What is Enlightenment? magazine, issue 31, has an article on Karen Armstrong and the supposed ‘Second Axial Age’. See post from a few days ago: Armstrong on Axial Age.
Moved to http://history-and-evolution.com/darwiniana/armstrong_axial1.htm
Rereading A. N. Wilson’s God’s Funeral I was struck by the ambiguity of what we mean by secularization, and the peculiar status of Darwinism in that context. The book is really about the late nineteenth century (the title is from a poem by Hardy), with two openers on Kant and Hume, and is a well-done snapshot of the emergence of modern atheism, or at least of this as a result, since its latency period, as with so much else, is much earlier– in the early modern. (If you don’t think so it is worth pursuing the ‘god is dead’ theme via Hegel to the early Protestant hymn with that for a title. ) There is a irony here. We think that Darwin is the primemover in the passage to modern secularism, collated wrongly by some with atheism in one to one fashion. But in fact we see the process well underway before Darwin. If anything the onset of the idea of evolution in Darwin’s version is simply reacting to its times rather than casting a new foundation stone. The curious problem is that Darwin’s theory represents the onset of a new myth made to prop up a crystallizing belief system, and from that point a counterattack slowly begins. This sudden metaphysical vulnerability has, if anything, done a disservice to secularism by narrowing its focus, and preempting a broader modernism sourcing in an Enlightenment we have reduced to cliches of positivism, and much deeper than what we currently take as its legacy.
Reply to an exchange on the ’science of history’ at History & Theory listserve: Science, Laws, and History
I watch this debate over the science of history with some puzzlement…
Moved to
http://history-and-evolution.com/darwiniana/laws_of_history.htm
The Brown Alumni Magazine has an article on The Evolution Of Ken Miller, comments also at Evolutionblog.
Talk.origins has a useful archive in html of the Kitzmiller vs. Dover case documents, plus other links.
Jay Wexler, in his debate with Beckwith over the constitutionality of teaching ID has a forthcoming article, abstract below; commented on at Dispatches From The Culture Wars.
It would seem that teaching ID in biology classes is a Bad Idea from the word go, but to say that it is unconstitutional to do so is problematic, to say the least. It is liable to amount to saying that it is unconstitutional to even think about teleology! Why not simply outlaw Aristotle, while you are at it! You cannot make it unconstitutional to disagree with Darwin. And no use saying high schools deserve one policy while universities get another. That merely gives the game away (on both sides): the minds of the young are at risk of being liberated from brainwashing. How did scientists get in this mess? For it is true, in practice, whatever the legal theory, that bringing ID into classrooms would, or could, be a pernicious moment, a rubicon.
Part of the problem is the lack of a ‘dialectic’, a subject that I fear was terminated by Hegelian attempts to make it an absolute metaphysics. But the point is that science is not a one way march to Truth, but a zigzag in a field where a dialectical spectrum is the case. The heritage of mathematical physics is a misleading luxury. If you try to fix biology in the same fashion, purely imitative, the dialectic will turn and bite you.
This merely means that enquiry is the only methodology of science, and any dogma as rigid as the Darwinian is at risk of becoming a de facto religion itself. Only the absence of such an internalized dialectic, explicit from the beginning, could have left scientists so vulnerable to the inexorable externalized dialectic of traditionalists.
I reserve the right to disagree with myself on what I just said, on the grounds of internalized dialectic.
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Daniel Gilbert, author of The Vagaries of Religious Experience, explores the illusions of agency at Edge.org
Is God is nothing more than an attempt to explain order and good fortune by those who do not understand the mathematics of chance, the principles of self-organizing systems, or the psychology of the human mind?
The vagaries of self-organization are fully the equivalent of the theological. It seems that modern science is condemned to a strange fate: noone can grasp the subject of probability. Things that are non-random are taken as sourcing in the random, invoking the ’self-organization’ mantra. This confusion is evident in the economic misuse of the term, and ‘economic self-oganization’ is taken as a template for evolution.
The point should be that, and perhaps the point is a lost cause in a monotheistic geographical region, ’self-organization’ is a prime contender to explicate, not the source of order from randomness, but the source of order as such. We see naturalistic processes that produce order, and it is indeed the vagaries of religious experience that tempt us to stop short with design arguments.
Consider the eonic effect. We see an immense process of ’self-organization’ operating over many millennia, visible in a clear non-random patterning of historical events. This isn’t randomness at work, but a directed evolutionary process that we are unable at this point to explicate. Such a phenomenon does indeed induce the illusions of agency, and it is not chance that the Israelites catching a glimpse of universal history made up myths about superagents in history.
Let us set these aside, but without invoking the ‘magic’ of chance, another illusion of agency.
It is all very well to speak about self-organization. So consider the data of the Axial Age. A stupendous derandomizing process, one that extracts itself from illusions of agency. In a word, evolution in action. Theology won’t help. But can science face the facts itself? Is ’self-organization’ another magical wishfulfilment?
The Letters to the Editor at New York Review of books has an exchange over the term ‘evolution’: http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18570.
Darwin was reluctant to use the term ‘evolution’ in his Origin because of its association with the developmental tradition, and the idea of fixed emergence (the word appears in the last paragraph). But we have drifted into this usage, applying the term to non-progressive selectionist processes. Thus, Darwin’s theory isn’t about evolution at all, and it is merely an assumption, based on insufficient evidence, to say that random processes can substitute for real evolution. Part of the problem is that the ‘predetermined development’, such as we see in embryology is one extreme, random evolution another. Neither will quite express the complex mixture of evolutionary directionality and random sideline processes that, combined and overlaid, make up real ‘evolution’, but to which we are blinded by the misuse of concepts.
Dilbert blog registers a dismally correct point, in a tangle with Pharyngula. There isn’t anyone, apparently, that we can trust to speak on the subject of evolution! This isn’t a plea for the ID position.
Let me say very clearly here that I’m not denying the EXISTENCE of slam-dunk credible evidence for evolution. What I’m denying is the existence of credible PEOPLE to inform me of this evidence.
The people who purport to have evidence of evolution do a spectacular job of making themselves non-credible.
Canned arguments are starting to reach critical mass, socia asphyxiation. Actually the problem starts with Darwin in Origin where he had a clever tactic of raising objections to his theory. It sounds like it’s all in good faith, disguising the severe flaws at the foundations of his whole enterprise. Another problem is the way shouting, condescension, and imputations against the intelligence of doubters, is used to manipulate emotions, and intimidate. Darwinism’s unique ability to confuse the highly intelligent leaves a false plus in its favor: the experts have spoken.
Actually, the presentation of the evidence is, in one way, adequate, if all you want is the case for ’something labeled evolution’ in deep time. It is when the conclusions drawn from this are pressed onto our belief modules that the credibility gap goes critical. ID-ists are right, no doubt, to accuse ‘methodological naturalism’ for much preconceived thinking, but unfortunately the supposed opposite, by a false antithesis, is not ‘methodological spiritualism’.
The debate often seems like a clever way to coddle the suggestible by presenting two false alternatives in a dialectic, as if these summarized the possibilities.
Stranger Fruit has links to Chris Mooney’s discussion of Tom Bethel’s Politically Incorrect Guide to Science which is filled with a host of rants that are easy targets for Mooney’s attack on the Republican War on Science. Reading Bethel on the environment is downright alarming. But then the discussion gets into evolution at Sciencegate and we have the reincarnation of a twenty-five year old argument between Bethel and Gould, one that is a strict stalemate due to the hopeless confusion of both sides. Remarkably it is Bethel who seems to charge Darwinists with ideology, as Gould defends Darwin. The question of the tautology of the fitness criterion aside the issue of evolutionary progress really does, contra Gould, constitute a problem for Darwin. Gould rightly attacks Victorian ideological versions of the idea of progress, but this begs the question of how to do it right. Gould’s tenacity in defending Darwin on natural selection is a puzzle to me. The man in revolt against the paradigm has delayed its passage with this obstinate defense of Darwin.
The way out of this stalemate can’t occur without actual evidence of evolutionary progress. Actually the evidence is all around us, but we can’t see it because two levels of evolution are so overlaid that we confuse them. My eonic model can sort out those two levels for history, and that allows us to see that the dynamism of progress and the idea, with its ideologies, are too separate things. Armed with that clue we see the basic rightness of Lamarck’s initial take on evolution (not to be confused with his theory of adaptation): On one level there is progression, on another adaptation, and/or deviating lines of development. Darwinists forbid themselves the first level, forever confusing the issue.
I find it alarming therefore that Bethel in the midst of his other dangerous confusions should be the one to point this out.
Here’s the gist, and it need only be taken on provision: Evolution is a braided macro/micro double process, the macro is almost never visible, but requires higher evidence density that we normally have. My eonic effect is one of the few good examples, and it makes clear how easy it is to miss the macro part. This macro represents the progression aspect, I won’t say progress. The micro represents the part that we tend to confuse with evolution, and there natural selection does indeed seem the key, but only in earlier evolution.
The point is that Gould’s statement that Darwin will be with us for some time may well be true, but only because we could be condemned forever to our evolutionary blindness, which conservatives won’t rescue us from.
Critque of Evolutionary Economy
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_tautology.html
A New website from Australia on ID has a long list of scientists who have signed to the following:
WARE SKEPTICAL OF CLAIMS FOR THE ABILITY
OF RANDOM MUTATION AND NATURAL SELECTION TO ACCOUNT FOR THE COMPLEXITY OF LIFE. CAREFUL EXAMINATION OF THE EVIDENCE FOR DARWINIAN THEORY SHOULD BE ENCOURAGED.”
I’ll buy that, but, frankly, I am skeptical of the ability of intelligent design to do any better.
A requirement for those who promote ID is to withdraw their claims from association with religions of historical monotheism, on the grounds that bias is involve, and, quite apart from hegemonic cultural ambitions, Big Bucks (think of the profit potential for televangelism from ID with a whiff of science).
Trick question: Is the Old Testament evidence that Intelligent Design pervades history? If so, what about the Greek Axial. Was that designed too?
Stanley Fish takes ID to task in the current Harper’s (12/05) for its appropriation of postmodern strategies. But here we have a problem. The ‘postmodern’ strategy is endemic throughout a host of New Age movements, and in fact the term shows one of its first appearances in Toynbee. It is not a left invention. In any case, the strategy is a false one, to be sure, although one has to wonder that the postmodern left should now complain.
The postmodern critics of science missed the boat here. The reign of Darwinism really does serve the interests of those in power and is quite hegemonic.
At the end of the article Fish makes a dubious comparison with Holocaust deniers, not quoted.
Larry Arnhart has a new book. Darwinian Conservatism. His website also has a reply to Herbert Gintis’ Amazon Review.
It is strange that an essentially conservative theory such as Darwin’s is rejected by many conservatives and embraced from the start by many on the left. We know that Marx was initially ambivalent about Darwin’s theory, but with the enthusiasm of Engels and many in the Second Internationale the Darwinization of Marxism was irrestible.
Larry Arnhart’s interesting book on Darwinism and Natural Right nonetheless has a problem. What do we mean by ‘natural right’.
Let us note in passing that students of the eonic effect have a direct case for the evolution of natural right itself, relative to world history, in the eonic sense. How account for the fact that traditions of natural right instantly reflect the rise of the modern, and become ideological support for revolutionary ideologies? Eh? Answer that, ye fine feathered conservatives. The second edtion of World History and The Eonic Effect had only a brief passage on this question, due to the sheer massive amount of things to consider, but take the question more generally. Burke vs. the Revolutionaries. Although the attempts by some lefttists to exploit ideas of ‘fast evolution’ are almost always flawed, the Burkean view of how society develops is itself almost 180 degrees off the mark.
The eonic model forces the discipline of two levels, and won’t allow us to make any direct connection between revolutions and evolution, but once we set that caution we see that the ‘modern transition’ in the sense of the eonic model is chock full of revolutions, so, therefore, there is some connection as long as we distinguish the two levels, the ‘eonic determination and free action’ issue. The point is that while we can’t say that ‘revolutions’ are a dynamic of evolution, we can say, looking backwards, that revolutionary change is strongly correlated with the modern transition. The evidence is overwhelming, from the German Social Revolution in the sixteenth century onward. That most of these revolutions failed is beside the point. This issue requires long and careful study of the eonic model, with a view to the way in which evolution and history overlap and the way in which evolution is brought into the present.
But the conservative hopes for a Burkean view of evolution, Arnhart is quite right, are indirectly championed by a theory such as Darwin’s. The problem is that Darwin is simply wrong, and muddles the whole question of social evolution.
Ever since the publication of Darwin’s Origin of the Species in 1859, political and religious conservatives have had an uneasy relationship with Darwin’s theory of evolution. Many conservatives accept the Biblical doctrine that human beings were specially created by God in His image. And some conservatives believe that the living world shows evidence of being the product of an “intelligent designer”. Many of these conservatives fear that the idea of humans evolving naturally from lower animals denies their moral dignity as special creatures of the Divine Intelligent Designers.
Going against this movement, Larry Arnhart aims to persuade conservatives that Darwin is their friend and not their enemy. The author claims that a Darwinian science of human nature supports the moral, political and religious ideas of conservatism. Darwinian biology confirms the conservatives’ realist view of human nature and denies the leftists’ utopian view of human nature as perfectible.
Pharyngula has some transcribed notes on the speech by the Dalai to the neuroscience group. I await the full text… The attempt to bridge Buddhism and science is so important that crucial points of difference are likely to be PR’ed into thin air with the Lama’s approach. The question of mind and neuroscience is one that will persist no matter what, although it is significant to note that core Buddhism doesn’t require beliefs here, only the process of ‘enquiry into consciousness’, sometimes known as ‘meditation’, a term that like ‘guru’, which now means ‘business expert’, has fallen into an oblivion created by the ‘yoga for relaxion’ set. The purpose of meditation is not ‘relaxation’ or ‘improved emotional balance’. The reification of the term leads inexorably to its oblivion. If you wish to do meditation you would do well to invent a new term, and ask yourself what it means. I can think of a similar problem with monotheists, if they deserve the term: if divinity is of any interest at all at this point, you would need to invent a new term for ‘god’, because once you use that word you are semantically trapped in the gibberish that has claimed this term. Even the ID crowd is afraid to use it. The Lama evaded the question of evolution, and the hint of heresy in his recent book is all we have to go on.
Fox News reports on a new college course on ID:
LAWRENCE, Kan. — Creationism and intelligent design are going to be studied at the University of Kansas, but not in the way advocated by opponents of the theory of evolution.
A course being offered next semester by the university religious studies department is titled “Special Topics in Religion: Intelligent Design, Creationism and other Religious Mythologies.”
Why not do it right? How about a college course that can ‘teach the controversy’, something proposed for the schools, but which is perhaps beyond their capacity.
First item on the agenda is a decent history of the idea of evolution. Most of the standard texts on the history of Darwinism are written according to the Darwin narrative, which is fiction, and makes it hard to grasp what is really going on.
The course could simply start with the Greeks, the Indians, then the Enlightenment, proceed via Kant, the teleomechanists, Naturphilosophie, Hegel/Marx/Feuerback, Lamarck, Erasmus Darwin, St. Hilaire, Vestiges, Wallace, Huxley, Darwin, Spencer, Social Darwinism done right (the facts), the end of the century controversies, the rise of fundamentalism, the study of ideology, the philosophic context (Spinoza, the Pantheism debate), Positivism, histories of ethics, the history of liberalism and its ideologies, etc… The scientific critics of Darwinism are the best counter to the ID gambit, viz. Robert Reid, with his Evolution: The Unfinished Synthesis, also a history of dissent. If the teaching of evolution stopped censoring itself, it would take a few direct hits, self-inflicted, then recover its intergrity and make its defense against assault more intelligent.
Darwinists can’t give up the ambition to seize all discourse in the name of science, theirs being a flawed science. The obsessive desire of too many Darwinians to reprogram culture according to strict reductionism and cliche Darwinism has to fail sometime. Repeat, has to fail sometime. Why? They wish to bring religion into the schools, the Darwinian religion. Maybe that time is about now. The simple remedy has no takers.
Continuing the question of Karen Armstrong on the Axial Age, previous post here, which you can read first.
Googling Karen Armstrong’s views on a so-called ‘Second Axial Age’ I find a number of seminars on the subject, with this from a conference of the Jesus Seminar. Who should we find present here but Eugenie Scott! Hey wait a minute! I will indulge a moment’s (paranoid) speculation that we are to be treated to a version of the “Second Axial Age” that is sanitized on Darwin. You won’t get away with it. If you propose an Axial Age, or a second Axial Age, you have to declare by what evolutionary dynamic this occurs, and in the process address the issue of Darwinism. Obviously that will kill the sales of Ms. Armstrong’s projected book, and with Eugenie Scott scurrying in the shadows I doubt if we will hear a peep on evolution.
I have a bad feeling about all of this….
Wouldn’t the establishment like a bad book by Armstrong on the Axial Age, one well-behaved on Darwin, a book so bad it will discredit the idea for another generation, and quite possibly deflect attention from my comprehensive treatment of the subject, which is not well-behaved on Darwinism.
The theme of the conference was “The Future of the Judeo-Christian Tradition in the Second Axial Age.” The philosopher Karl Jaspers had coined the phrase “first axial age” to refer to the period from 800 BCE to 200 CE, when virtually every major civilization witnessed the appearance of key religious figures, prophets and sages. The second axial age denotes, according to the Seminar, the revolution in Western thinking from 1600 on produced by the Enlightenment and the rise of modern science, including the discoveries of Copernicus, Galileo and Darwin. The last one hundred years are apparently included by the Seminar in this age, even though other commentators would mark ours as the start of a new historical period: the “postmodern” era.
Here is the crux of the confusion, and we see that the current New Age postmodern strategy is at work. Armstrong’s plans for a book on the (Second) Axial Age is now transparent, complete with a ‘logos-mythos’ version of the issue of God. Armstrong’s pet theme is ‘logos=mythos’, which must mean ‘make it up as you go along’.
The problem lies with the postulation of ‘age periods’. The ‘Axial Age’ points to a definite phenomenon, but there is no ‘age period’ as such called an ‘Axial Age’ save as a descriptive category. If you try to generalize and postulate a ’second Axial Age’ you are in trouble, you need a definition of ‘age periods’. And there is, for the same reason, no such thing as a ‘postmodern’ age.
The study of the eonic effect completely resolves all these questions, and it is to be hoped that Ms. Armstrong in her declared intent to write a book on this subject get her act together or the result will a hopeless mess. Clearly she will not deign to read my book, so, armed with the power of celebrity bestsellerdom, we will be treated to some real crud.
World History and The Eonic Effect completely resolves this question of ‘axial periods’, ‘age periods’, ‘new ages’, phoney ‘new ages’, postmodern phoney ‘new ages’, gurus promoting postmodern phoney ‘new ages’, plots against modernity, modern freedom, democracy, and spiritual autonomy by gurus promoting postmoern phoney ‘new ages’, … enough?
I also have a tutorial series on the ‘Axial Age’ at
Tutorial on Axial Age
It is perhaps to be expected that Big Biz should consist of cowards scared away from the Darwin debate: The Darwin exhibition frightening off corporate sponsors
Why is it that 51% of Americans reject the theory of evolution? Without being unfair about the obvious klutz factor in the mentally retarded American religious culture, part of the blame must rest on the transparent failure of the Darwin establishment to present evolution as distinguished from the theory of natural selection. This fatal flaw in the mode of discourse has left a gaping hole a mile wide that, unbelievably, gives creationists idiocy an edge against science.
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Robert Reich at American Prospect blames the right for both ID and Social Darwinism. True enough, but the ’standard strategy’ of Darwin defenders of deflecting the charges of Social Darwinism onto Spencer get a bit tiresome.
Social Darwinism was developed some 30 years after Darwin’s famous book by a social thinker named Herbert Spencer. Extending Darwin into a realm Darwin never intended, Spencer and his followers saw society as a competitive struggle where only those with the strongest moral character should survive, or else the society would weaken. It was Spencer, not Darwin, who coined the phrase “survival of the fittest.” Social Darwinism thereby offered a perfect moral justification for America’s Gilded Age, when robber barons controlled much of American industry, the gap between rich and poor turned into a chasm, urban slums festered, and politicians were bought off by the wealthy. It allowed John D. Rockefeller, for example, to claim that the fortune he accumulated through the giant Standard Oil Trust was “merely a survival of the fittest … the working out of a law of nature and a law of God.”
Why is it that liberals have a fetish about defending Darwin here?
Adrian Desmond’s biography of Darwin, Darwin, Life of a Tormented Evolutionist blows the whistle on this approach.
Social Darwinism is often taken to be something extraneous, an ugly concretion to the pure Darwinian corpus after the event, tarnishing Darwin’s image. But his notebooks make plain that competition, free trade, imperialism, racial extermination, and sexual inequality, were written into the equation from the start—‘Darwinism’ was always intended to explain human society
Social Darwinism was invented by Malthus, no doubt, and certainly appears in Spencer, but is given its indirect and insidious justification in DARWIN, and it would help if the point were brought home on the liberal dupes of this theory. The true source of the problem is the clumsy inability to produce theories of society that aren’t influenced by the idea of natural selection. Beyond that lies the subtle confusion with economics.
S. J. Gould in The Structure of Evolutionary Theory states the unwitting confusion with especial clarity,
I would advance the even stronger claim that the theory of natural selection is, in essence, Adam Smith’s economics transferred to nature.
If you are a Darwinist, then you are a Social Darwinist. Over and out.
We need new kinds of evolutionary models that don’t muddle social discourse with Darwin ideological noise. This has nothing to do with ID.
Toward a Postdarwinian Liberalism
The current Natural History exhibit has a fullscale mockup of Darwin’s study. Perhaps they should stage of replay of Darwin on the day of the arrival of the Ternate letter. Here is an analysis of the question of the date of the arrival of the letter by Arnold Brackman, in his A Delicate Arrangement, Chapter 3.
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FOR THE NEXT HUNDRED DAYS, until his manuscript reached Down, Alfred Russel Wallace stood alone in the world as, in our time, Neil Armstrong stood on the moon in 1969, and Charles A. Lindbergh sat, isolated in the cabin of his tiny airplane over the vastness of the mid-Atlantic less than a generation earlier. Wallace was the first individual in history to set out a complete view of man as a creature of evolution, descended from a closely allied species in both time and space, his descent and diversity modified by the process of natural se- lection. Unknown to the thirty-five-year-old Wallace, this was the supreme moment of his life. There were no trumpets, no flags, no headlines, nothing to show for it except the new way he looked at the living world around him.
From Brackman’s A Delicate Arrangement
As the Natural History exhibit gets underway it might be nice to recall the sordid history of the beginnings of Darwinism, in the tale as recounted by Arnold Brackman, in his A Delicate Arrangement. This was follow by Brooks’ Just Before the Origin, and then Michael Shermer’s damage control In Darwin’s Shadow. The public deserves to grasp that it was Wallace not Darwin who first proposed a theory of (micro) evolution, and to be aware of the conspiracy surrounding Wallace’s contribution, and the rapid composition of Origin by Darwin, in the wake of the famous Ternate letter. The work of Brackman is a first rate investigation, although the issue of whether Darwin copped the theory of divergence from Wallace is perhaps unknowable at this point. Whatever the case, the record of deception, and missing letters, for whatever reason, exhudes a bad odor to this day, a preposterous situation amid all the peans for Darwin. So from the moment Wallace mailed his famous essay from Ternate, to the time of its receipt by Darwin, we have Wallace’s 100 days.
If, as the record makes plain, Wallace was a copilot on the epic flight toward a revolutionary understanding of the development of the human species, why is he unknown today? The question is compounded by evidence that Wallace, not Darwin, first wrote out the complete theory of the origin and divergence of species by natural selection-the theory which is today universally ascribed to Darwin.
The explanation for Wallace’s disappearance from history is basically
!threefold. In part, he was the victim of a conspiracy by the scientific aristocracy of the day and was robbed in 1858 of his priority in the proclaiming of the theory. “This delicate arrangement,” Huxley’s son Leonard termed the incident. “This delicate situation,” Darwin characterized it in a letter to Sir Joseph Dalton Hooker, the great botanist and intimate friend of Darwin.
In part, the explanation for Wallace’s disappearance from history is also found in his relatively lowly social status at a time-the Victorian period-of which rampant snobbery was a hallmark.
And in part, Wallace’s subsidence sterns from the nature of his own character. He turned the other cheek.
What follows is the largely untold story of the conspiracy against Wallace and its cover-up, and the story of Alfred Russel Wallace himself. It is also the tale of the strange relationship between Wallace and Darwin. For without Wallace there would have been no Darwin. And without Darwin, Wallace’s story may have had a different ending.
From Brackman again.
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What is Enlightenment? magazine, issue 31, has an article on Karen Armstrong and the supposed ‘Second Axial Age’. Text is listed below, after my commentary. This page updates a post from a few days ago, and is also available at
A Second Axial Age?
The use of the term ‘Axial Age’ has suffered confusion, and has degenerated in some accounts into a conception of an age that produced the great religions. But that is not what the Axial Age was. Armstrong’s thinking here needs my eonic effect model!
Armstrong notes in the article that she plans to write a book on the Second Axial Age. Based on the material here, and the earlier material in Armstrong’s books, I would strongly caution against that. It will be a lousy book indeed, although it might well sell in the current postmodern New Age crowd. Armstrong is in over her head on this Axial notion of hers, and even a cursory glance at my eonic model shows the traps involved. The whole question of the Axial Age enters into my work in a marginal fashion, as a descriptive, not theoretical term. From there I completely recast the foundations of the idea. Any attempt to speculate about Big History using the Axial concept is going to be pure nonsense unless you are very careful to indulge at most in empirical periodization, my approach. I doubt if Ms. Armstrong will listen, but if you plan to go over Niagara Falls, I can’t stop you.
Further, her thinking seems to have shifted slightly on this, first was the idea of some kind of postmodern resurgence of religion as the Second Axial Age, then suddenly there was a shift, she speaks of this Second Axial Age starting in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. I was left wondering if she had seen my website! Jaspers himself seems unclear on this, and never quite proposed a second Axial Age.
The Grandeur of Evolution in a New Exhibition Called ‘Darwin’ The constant promotion of the Myth of Darwinism ticks over in the current promo for the Natural History museum exhibit.
The fixation on Darwin is always puzzling, and he is taken as a near religious founder. Thus
In the summer of 1868, Charles Darwin and his family visited the poet Alfred Tennyson and his family on the Isle of Wight. The visit - and the visitor’s ideas - troubled Tennyson. “What I want,” he later told a friend, “is an assurance of immortality.”
Tennyson’s views, and hope, belong to the misconceptions of Christian tradition, where the question of immortality has been the object of myth made into belief, and it is very easy for science, even at a minimalist level, to seem as if it produced a revolution in thought.
To ask for an assurance here is to indulge in metaphysical hope, and possible wish fulfilment.
But what has happened is that, armed with Darwin, a contrary assurance is given.
The plain truth is that Darwin’s theory of natural selection offers no assurance of the error of beliefs in immortality. In fact the question is incoherent, rendered so by the impoverished character of Christian theology, not that anyone else has the answers.
But the question of soul and immortality has not been resolved by modern science, except by fiat, and even a cursory glance at the traditions of, for example, Buddhism will show the limits of reductionist thinking.
There we find an irony, that while monotheism produces the fictions of the supernatural soul, the Buddhist version of the Indian tradition tends toward what can only be called the ‘material issue of soul’, whereby the object of religion is not immortality, but its transcendence, the passing away from the round of births. The question of Buddhism can be misleading due to its almost ironic critique of its Upanishadic predecessor, the anatta constrasted to the ‘atman’. But in the end the two are the same, and the passage ‘beyond soul’ that constitutes liberation is something that calls for a better understanding than the current false divisions of materialism and spiritualism.
One would do well to be wary of the beliefs surrounding reincarnation, but to declare that Darwinism has produced a scientific refutation, not of their deviating forms, but of their basis, is simply untrue. The depth of man is completely truncated by Darwinian versions of the organism.
The question is best addressed for Westeners by the philosopher Kant whose double skepticism of both rational thelogy, and misguided empiricism, at the limits of the noumenal/phenomenal, have prejudged the issue.
Charles Krauthammer takes on ID:
Phony Theory, False Conflict
‘Intelligent Design’ Foolishly Pits Evolution Against Faith
Because every few years this country, in its infinite tolerance, insists on hearing yet another appeal of the Scopes monkey trial, I feel obliged to point out what would otherwise be superfluous: that the two greatest scientists in the history of our species were Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein, and they were both religious.
I am glad conservatives are ditching ID, we can return to the original Darwin debate, perhaps from a liberal/left perspective, where it always belonged.
But these comments on Newton and Einstein are beside the point. Newton, btw, believed in design, Thomas Ray being a member of the Royal Society, and he also knew the limits of his science, and did not try to foist his physics on subjects where it didn’t apply. He was not like current reductionists, in a word. We all have to revolt against Darwinism sooner or later.
Now we come to what must be the real issue. Seeing the results of the Dover election, conservatives are running scared, and the call goes out to all able bodied ‘rats’, Abandon, Ship. I hope this isn’t snide cynicism on my part. But I am left wondering what would have happened if the vote had gone the other way.
Which brings us to Dover, Pa., Pat Robertson, the Kansas State Board of Education, and a fight over evolution that is so anachronistic and retrograde as to be a national embarrassment.
Dover distinguished itself this Election Day by throwing out all eight members of its school board who tried to impose “intelligent design” — today’s tarted-up version of creationism — on the biology curriculum. Pat Robertson then called the wrath of God down upon the good people of Dover for voting “God out of your city.” Meanwhile, in Kansas, the school board did a reverse Dover, mandating the teaching of skepticism about evolution and forcing intelligent design into the statewide biology curriculum.
Finally,
Let’s be clear. Intelligent design may be interesting as theology, but as science it is a fraud.
True, but so is Darwin’s theory.